Time to take a more direct view?

If you’ve been lucky enough to have experienced direct view screen technology (or ‘active screens’, as some call this new genre), you don’t need me to tell you that it looks and feels pretty special.

There’s no projection booth at the back of the room, eating into valuable seating space. There’s no projectionist. And there’s definitely no projector. Instead, your brain takes a few moments to get used to super-size images with spectacular corner-to-corner brightness and uniformity, jaw-dropping contrast and gorgeously rich, lifelike colours. Just as importantly, these images are always 100% in focus.

From an industry perspective, cinemas’ progressive evolution from conventional projection to direct view may well be even more seismic than the shift from 35mm film to digital that began over ten years ago. This time round, however, there’s a different twist. The movie studios won’t be picking up the tab for direct view – in stark contrast with the Virtual Print Fee (VPF) scheme that Hollywood funded to underwrite cinemas’ investment in first-generation projectors. Right now, direct view is anything but a cheap option. And that entails a serious capital cost that sits squarely in the lap of the cinemas themselves.

You may have already seen Sony’s own Crystal LED solution presented at various industry events around Europe and Stateside. It’s a game-changer. But the reality is that we’re still some way off having a market-ready direct view cinema-grade product. The technology’s tricky – we haven’t even talked about the audio – as are the economics. So right now we are living in very interesting times where everyone’s talking about direct view… but nobody’s actually selling it, buying it or watching it. Yet. So we are right back to the pre-series 1 era yet again: however this time with a different and totally foreign technology.

More so than the switch to digital, direct view will change the very nature of our cinemagoing experience. A directly-illuminated screen at 1000 nits brightness is so bright you don’t even need to switch the house lights off. And at that point, cinemas and patrons must re-evaluate the concept of what ‘moviegoing’ really means. Does it mean buying a ticket and some popcorn, then sitting motionless in a dark room for over two hours? Or will it soon mean sitting in an attractive décor with the lights on, enjoying food and drink with friends while a film plays on one wall? The question sounds very na?ve, but it’s more important than ever: what is ‘cinema’? Is it a static, rigid definition – or something that we need to accept may change over time?

And that’s only the start. Movie content looks very different on direct view screens, offering far higher brightness and contrast plus a wider colour gamut than today’s DCI specifications. And that opens up a load of fresh aesthetic and commercial considerations for directors, cinematographers and studios. We’ve already seen the intense controversy stirred up by Peter Jackson’s experimentation with higher frame rates. Direct view will surely re-ignite that debate with even greater ferocity.

Let me hold my own hand up at this point, and ask if middle-aged marketeers, engineers and standards makers really know what audiences want. For better or worse, our own world-view is different from a 13-year old child who’s growing up in front of a gaming console, or a 4K direct view image at 60 frames per second on their smartphone or tablet. That kid has a totally different perception of what the ‘right’ image looks like. So as an industry, it’s surely time for us all to take a more direct view of the future – and really understand our audiences’ changing expectations and needs.

As much as my own brain immediately switches to ‘cinema mode’ when it’s exposed to content at 24 frames per second, it just will not work with direct view screens operating at 500 or even 1,000 nits: the motion blur will destroy the experience. In that sense, I applaud recent efforts by some very high-profile directors, urging TV manufacturers to feature a ‘reference mode’ on their sets. This will at least ensure that viewers can watch a movie the way it was meant to be seen – assuming that’s what they actually want, of course.

The same should surely apply for direct view screens in commercial cinemas: a movie that’s been created and graded for screening at 14 fL should be shown no brighter than this. But if we really want to drive these ‘Ferraris’ of image reproduction at maximum performance, then we’re going to need more frames right from the very beginning. This time, the change from projection to display technology will need to have an even bigger impact on the way movies are being created, much more than it has been with the change from film to digital.

And please don’t worry too much about second-guessing on behalf of audiences. Not only are they used to low motion judder image: frequently they’re actively choosing it as an option to ‘enhance’ their experience. Working for a company that provides professional technology to cinemas and is also a market leader in consumer technology, we’re very familiar with the habits of our high-end home cinema projector customers. Having spent a small fortune on a device ostensibly to recreate the experience of being at the movies, most of these enthusiasts are selecting frame interpolation technology (Sony’s own advanced version of this is called ‘MotionFlow’), simply because that’s the way they prefer to watch films. What’s ‘right’ to them is surely what really matters here – and not other peoples’ personal opinions.

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